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Our pirate tale from Drupal Developer Days Seville 2017

03.31.17

One more year we had the joy to attend the Drupal Developer Days, an event focused on sprints and the technical side of Drupal. This time it was organized by the community members of Seville and they prepared a very lovely pirate theme with an according venue.

This year was especially important for us because we stepped in as one of the many sponsors. Cristina also supported the organization creating the design and helping with the web theme’s development.

Sprints

It was an amazing experience to see so many people in such a broad space collaborating together to make Drupal awesome.

Cristina’s focus was usability holding discussions on how the experience for the Drupal user should improve and worked on some visual design issues. One of the discussions she enjoyed the most was about restructuring the admin interface with ifrik and Rachel.

Ramon and me (Rodrigo) seized the opportunity to improve a module that helps our day to day QA experience: migrate default content. Now we have a leaner cleaner code with less dependencies and some new features like Paragraps support. Face to face talks and contributions from other members of the community reassured the usefulness of the module and gave us new ideas to make it even more flexible and powerful.

Sessions

I want to highlight some sessions that really gave me some insights on how to improve our workflows:

Advanced Configuration Management with Config Split et al. was for me an update on how the advanced use cases for configuration can be managed with a handful of modules and some very interesting tips on how to manage changing configuration on live enviroments and still keep control of the changes in your code repository.

I attended Deploying Drupal: Patterns and Antipatterns expecting to learn a shiny new trick but I got much more by holding an open discussion on how the deploy process gained in complexity from just copying some PHP files over FTP to the custom and sofisticated deploys we have nowadays and what are the reasons behind all this complications.

Ramon also attended Backwards Compatibility: Burden & Benefit where the speaker explains what is the pain of creating too many APIs that Drupal core needs to maintain over versions and how that fact impacts on the compatibility for future versions. It also raised the false myth of creating an API for everything that we need to do in a module, and what’s the difference between an API module and a module that gives us only functionality.

Our talks

It’s always wonderful to have the opportunity to share the knowledge that we find valuable and see how is validated or challenged by your peers.

Cristina’s talk was about Responsive Images and Art direction in Drupal 8. She explained how we’re using them in our projects to improve final user’s experience giving more control and easy tools from contributed modules.

Ramon’s session was about the introduction of Migrate default content and explained why we created this module and what is its purpose for developers. He also explained what is the roadmap of the module and attendees gave him some interesting feedback about the module and the future plans.

Conclusion

Seville is a very welcoming city and you were able to see how everyone was doing their best at holding this fun event and keeping everyone delighted. So we take off our pirate hats to the group of organizers, volunteers, speakers and everyone who made this event wonderful.